Russia probably has more undercover 'sleeper' agents who can assassinate Western targets today than during the Cold War

Russia's programme for placing sleeper agents in foreign countries — spies who live ordinary, mundane lives — is probably bigger now than it was in the Cold War.

The so-called "illegals" are trained and controlled by two separate and sometimes competing Russian agencies, the mysterious "Directorate S" within the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR); and the "Main Intelligence Directorate" (GRU).

The end of the Cold War actually made it easier for Russia to place illegals inside the UK and US.

Russia wants its illegals to remain quiet and anonymous, developing low-level contacts on the edges of power. They don't act like James Bond.

We don't yet know who poisoned Sergei Skripal. But Russia's "illegal" sleeper agents are trained to do just that.

"They identify experts for assassination … confusion is half the battle." Their targets were "senior military and counter-intelligence officers," Madeira says. "Those people were very carefully targeted for assassination."

Assassinations work because "at the very least it's disruptive and demoralising … at best it's years of knowledge and contacts - that's all gone," Madeira says.

"The media underestimated considerably just how much of a continuous element this represents from a Russian point of view."

If you are baffled as to why Russia might want Skripal dead, that is the whole point

If you are baffled as to why Russia might want Skripal — who ceased to be active as a spy in 2004 — dead, that is the whole point, Madeira told Business Insider recently. The Russian security and counterintelligence apparatus likes it when its enemies are confused and distracted, and they put a lot of effort into keeping it that way.

In written evidence to the House of Commons Defence Committee, Madeira — a Russia expert — described the resources Russia commands in its efforts to subdue British, European and American influence.

"GRU has long deployed 'illegals'. These hand-picked, deep-cover intelligence officers live abroad under assumed 'legends': carefully constructed false foreign identities and life stories (over decades in some cases), allowing 'illegals' to blend in."

"... Nowadays, UK CI and CE [counterintelligence and counterespionage] resources are much diminished, while former Warsaw Pact nationals can easily travel across NATO. This is a particular problem if an intelligence officer/asset uses 'natural cover' (i.e. their own identity, sometimes called 'non-official cover' or NOC). A banker or travel agent may be just that - or they may also be intelligence officers or assets (the latter willing or coerced). Having few(er) or no traceable links to a hostile intelligence service, NOCs are far more difficult to detect, monitor and counter. This is why they are so valued."

"'Illegals' are the most prized of intelligence officers," Madeira, the author of "Britannia and the Bear," a history of espionage between the two nations, concluded.

"Despite the 'end' of the Cold War in 1989-1991, Russia's decades-long 'illegals' programmes didn't miss a beat. These programmes remain as strategic, long-term, resource-intensive in nature and prized as ever, with a single purpose: placing hand-picked Russian intelligence assets across foreign societies and governments, regardless of the current state of East-West relations," he told Business Insider recently.

The scariest part is what they are capable of if Russia wants to activate them in an emergency. Some illegals will be used to identify targets for assassinations.

Anna Chapman, the spy who worked at Barclays

Anna Chapman posted this photo of herself on Facebook before she was arrested. Facebook The most famous of the "illegals" is probably Anna Chapman, who was arrested and deported from the US with nine other sleeper agents in 2010. (Coincidentally, Skripal arrived in the UK because he was one of the Russian spies taken in by the West as part of that swap.)

When Chapman (real name Anna Vasilevna Kushchenko) was arrested, the media treated the event like a joke. Chapman did not appear to be engaged in any serious spying.

She gained UK citizenship through a marriage to a British citizen she met at a rave. She lived in London for at least five years, between 2001 and 2006, and worked at NetJets and Barclays, before moving to America. Perhaps, people said, the Chapman ring was a set of Soviet agents that the Russians forgot about after the wall came down? The story was later used as the premise for a TV show, "The Americans," starring Keri Russell. It tells the story of two KGB officers posing as a married couple who live in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Today, little is known about the true scale of Russia's "illegals" programme, beyond the fact that the Chapman arrests proved it was alive and well in 2010. What we do know comes from the Cold War, when Western counter-intelligence took the Russian threat more seriously.

In the mid-1980s, researchers estimated that the KGB's First Chief Directorate unit operated 200 "illegal" agents, and the GRU, separately, another 150.

The numbers of 'illegals' undercover in the West "are much higher nowadays."

"Personally, I am certain those figures are much higher nowadays," Madeira told Business Insider.

The reason: Russian state security agencies tend to think in terms of decades or generations, not years. The end of the Cold War made it easier for Russians to travel to Western countries, and the KGB's successor agencies will have regarded this as a long-term opportunity.

Spies no longer need to make a tortuous journey from Moscow through Asia or the Middle East, changing passports multiple times, before arriving in Europe. At the same time, the UK's commitment to counter-intelligence dwindled, as we entered the decade-long period of peace in the 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That made it easier for illegals to operate. Now they can get on a Moscow-to-Heathrow plane in the morning and disappear in London by lunchtime.

FBI mugshots of Anna Chapman and nine others in the "illegals" ring of 2010. FBI

The "Directorate S" training process can take years

The Chapman spy ring was run by Russia's SVR, or Foreign Intelligence Service (Russia has a multitude of often competing intelligence services). The SVR is a former unit of the KGB. Within the SVR is the mysterious "Directorate S," which recruits, trains, and supervises "illegals."

The process can take decades, and some "illegals" are sent over as married couples while their grown children stay behind in Russia as semi-free "hostages," to guarantee they will not defect. An account of the process was published in 1984 by Viktor Suvorov, a GRU agent who defected to the UK in 1978. It begins when the illegal trainee is housed in a secret Moscow dacha outfitted entirely as if it were a home in the West:

"... he wears the clothes and shoes, and eats the food, even smokes cigarettes and uses razor blades procured from overseas. In each room a tape recorder is installed which runs twenty-four hours a day while he is occupying the dacha. These tape recorders continuously broadcast news from the radio programmes of his target country. From the first day of his training he is supplied with the majority of papers and magazines. He sees many films and descriptions on video tapes of television broadcasts.

The instructors, for the most part former illegals, read the same papers and listen to the same radio programmes and spend their time asking their pupil the most difficult questions imaginable with regard to what has been read. It is quite obvious that after a number of years of such training, the future illegal knows by heart the composition of every football team, the hours of work of every restaurant and nightclub, the weather forecasts and everything that is going on in the realm of gossip as well as current affairs, in a country where he has never been in his life."

They become ordinary citizens, leading mundane lives

After she was deported back to Russia, Chapman went on to become a media celebrity. AP The curious aspect of the illegals programme is that once activated, these agents do not turn into Le Carre characters. They don't immediately infiltrate the military or MI6 or the CIA and transmit secret information back to Moscow. Rather, they become ordinary citizens, leading mundane lives.

The obvious question is, why do the Russians bother? The answer is that the mere ability to place foreign agents inside another country is an end in itself. Only then do they set about actually trying to conduct espionage.

"Historically, it's been exceedingly rare for 'illegal' Russian intelligence officers themselves to penetrate foreign governments generally. As good as 'illegal' legends can be for daily life, it'd be impossible for 'first-generation' 'illegals' to pass proper security vetting (I would hope!)" Madeira says.

"The role of the 'illegal' intelligence officer is to remain undetected by foreign counter-intelligence and counter-espionage services, while recruiting assets/agents/sources that either already have access to valuable information or are assessed to have the potential to do so," he told Business Insider.

"… On his arrival at his objective, the illegal sets about basic legalisation. He has been provided with good papers by the best forgers of the GRU on genuine blank passports. At the same time he is extremely vulnerable if he is not registered with the police or the tax departments. Any check may give him away and for this reason he endeavours to change jobs and places of work often to get his name onto as many company lists as he can and to acquire character references signed by real people. The ideal solution is for him to obtain new documentation from the police department under some pretext or another. Often he will marry another agent (who may already be his wife); she will then be given a genuine passport, and he will 'lose' his false one to have it replaced with a real one on the production of his wife's genuine document. The acquisition of a driving licence, credit cards, membership documents of clubs and associations are a vital element in 'legalising' the status of an illegal."

"One of their favourite means is to go through Western cemeteries, find a deceased child that passed away very young, then they will take that identity"

Viktor SuvorovWikimedia 2,0, CCThey will often steal the identity of a dead baby, Madeira says. "One of their favourite means is to go through Western cemeteries, find a deceased child that passed away very young, then they will take that identity, and if the checks work out they will create a false 'legend' and that person will gradually develop a life history, a foreign passport, they will speak foreign languages with no trace of an accent."

In addition to NetJets and Barclays, Chapman also ran a real estate agent office in New York.

The aim is to start at the outer circles of influence and develop a network that reaches upward to the top. Illegals have been "travel agents, think tanks, students," Madeira says.

"But what they all had in common was they were gradually trying to find their way, through work and networking, to the centres of power, the policymakers, the special advisers, people who have privileged insight to decision-making, or people who have a way of influencing. A wealthy individual who happens to be a party donor … they may have gone to school with a senator, they may have gone to school with an MP."

Note to readers: A version of this story was originally published on December 9, 2017, and updated with more recent information about the Skripal poisoning.